Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, data, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., bandwidth and transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (“CDMA”) systems, time division multiple access (“TDMA”) systems, frequency division multiple access (“FDMA”) systems, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (“LTE”) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (“OFDMA”) systems.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communication system can simultaneously support communications for multiple wireless terminals. Each terminal communicates with one or more base stations via transmissions on the forward and reverse links. The forward link (or downlink) refers to the communications link from the base stations to the terminals, and the reverse link (or uplink) refers to the communications link from the terminals to the base stations. This communications link may be established via a single-in-single-out, multiple-in-signal-out, or a multiple-in-multiple-out (“MIMO”) system.
A MIMO system employs multiple (“NT”) transmit antennas and multiple (“NR”) receive antennas for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the NT transmit and NR receive antennas may be decomposed into NS independent channels, which are also referred to as spatial channels, where NS≦min{NT, NR}. Each of the NS independent channels corresponds to a dimension. The MIMO system can provide improved performance (e.g., higher throughput and/or greater reliability) if the additional dimensionalities created by the multiple transmit and receive antennas are utilized.
A MIMO system supports both time division duplex (“TDD”) and frequency division duplex (“FDD”) systems. In a TDD system, the forward and reverse link transmissions are on the same frequency region so that the reciprocity principle allows the estimation of the forward link channel from the reverse link channel. This enables the access point to extract transmit beamforming gain on the forward link when multiple antennas are available at the access point.
Generally, wireless cellular communication networks incorporate a number of mobile user equipments (“UEs”) and a number of base nodes (“NodeBs”). A NodeB is generally a fixed station, and may also be called a base transceiver system (“BTS”), an access point (“AP”), a base station (“BS”), or some other equivalent terminology. As improvements to networks are made, the NodeB functionality has evolved, so a NodeB is sometimes also referred to as an evolved NodeB (“eNB”). In general, NodeB hardware, when deployed, is fixed and stationary, while UE hardware is portable.
In contrast to a NodeB, a mobile UE can comprise portable hardware. A UE, also commonly referred to as a terminal or a mobile station, may be a fixed or mobile device, and may be a wireless device, a cellular phone, a personal digital assistant (“PDA”), a wireless modem card, and so on. Uplink communication (“UL”) refers to a communication from a mobile UE to a NodeB, whereas downlink (“DL”) refers to a communication from a NodeB to a mobile UE.
Each NodeB contains radio frequency transmitter(s) and the receiver(s) used to communicate directly with the mobile UEs, which move freely around it. Similarly, each mobile UE contains radio frequency transmitter(s) and receiver(s) used to communicate directly with a NodeB. In cellular networks, the mobile UEs cannot communicate directly with each other but have to communicate with the NodeB.
Conventionally, for uplink transmission from UEs to a NodeB, only one transmit antenna is supported. While some conventional communication systems may provide features to enable antenna switching, generally only SIMO is supported for uplink transmissions, including for physical uplink channels such as the contention-based Physical Random Access Channel (“PRACH”) that is used for random and initial access functions.
However, it is appreciated that by enabling MIMO transmission via multiple transmit antennas, various operations such as beamforming, MU-MIMO, SU-MIMO, and the like can be conducted, which can increase the overall throughout of the communication system. What is needed, therefore, is a way to support the use of multiple antennas for a contention-based channel such as PRACH in a MIMO system so that a UE can utilize beamforming, transmit diversity, and/or any other suitable measure for increasing throughout. The present application address these issues.